Rui Nabeiro | |
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Born | Manuel Rui Azinhais Nabeiro 28 March 1931 |
Died | 19 March 2023
Lisbon, Portugal | (aged 91)
Occupation | Businessman |
Manuel Rui Azinhais Nabeiro GCIH ComMI (28 March 1931 – 19 March 2023) was a Portuguese billionaire businessman and philanthropist. [1] He was the founder of the Delta Cafés group. [2] [3]
Rui Nabeiro was born in Campo Maior, District of Portalegre, Portugal, in 1931. [4] He studied until the fourth grade, the primary school education in Portugal. [5] Starting at 12, he helped his mother in a small grocery store and his father and uncles in a family-owned coffee roasting workshop, at a time when the effects of the civil war in Spain (1936-1939) were still felt and the Portugal-Spain border was a place of smuggling. [2] He assumed the leadership of his family-owned coffee roasting business at 19, and Delta Cafés was founded by him in 1961, around his 30th anniversary. [6] A market leader in the coffee roasting business, he established Novadelta in 1982, and in 1984, he created a new coffee roasting factory, which was the largest on the Iberian Peninsula at the time. [7] In 2022, Rui Nabeiro was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Coimbra under the proposal of its School of Economics (FEUC). [8] In the same year, he won the Award for Merit and Excellence at the Golden Globes. [9]